Set in the bohemian milieu of pre-war Paris, the novel presents two artists, the Englishman Tarr and the German Kreisler, and their struggles with money, women and social situations. The novel abounds in somewhat Nietzschean themes. Tarr, generally thought to be modelled on Lewis himself, displays disdain for the 'bourgeois-bohemians' around him, and vows to 'throw off humour' which he regards -- especially in its English form -- as a 'means of evading...

Wyndham Lewis' novel is a satire of the literary world in the 1930s, which Lewis intended to be published in 1936, but which Cape did not publish because they feared the book could be libelous. Among the figures in the book world satirized here include Nancy Cunard, Virginia Woolf and Arnold Bennett (as Samuel Shodbutt).